The Power of Thinking without Thinking

October 14, 2019 The Editorial Board - Teamware Solutions

Rapid cognition is the sort of snap decision-making performed without thinking about how one is thinking, faster and often more correctly than the logical part of the brain can manage. Many a times these snap judgments can be as good or better than reasoned conclusions. Let us see how rapid cognition’s results can be improved.

The secret is in knowing which information to discard and which to keep. Our brains are able to perform that work unconsciously; when rapid cognition breaks down, the brain has seized upon a more obvious but less correct predictor. Sometimes wrong thin slicing our audiences/data can lead to failures. For example as a decision maker you might be given large amount of data/info to show the current trends however, many a times the intuition within us works as a better guide in many decisions. Take for example a decision you had taken to put your kid in a good school. There were so many options in front of you on excellent curriculum provided and top schools but knowing your child’s emotional and academic needs you had chosen a school that fits his/her attitude/preferences.

Many a times that inherent intuition that a particular choice of school you make would fit your kid’s needs would turn out to be better in the long run even though it might seem not yielding results immediately.

There are things that can be done to redirect our mind along lines more conducive to accurate thin-slicing: we can alter our unconscious biases; we can analyze numerical evidence and make decision trees; we can analyze all possible emotional needs and their shared meanings and we can evade our biases by blind screening, hiding the evidence that will lead us to incorrect conclusions.

However, one can become better at this by taking time off our busy schedules and practising calmness with time tested ancient techniques like Meditation, Yoga etc… but remember that intuition kicks in where logic provides you more than one options and mind is unsettled.